It there a better alternative home for the collected knowledge in old books besides the recycle bin?

After more than a decade, my household has finally decided to throw out the old books it has been accumulating. Primary targets include college textbooks and scientific reference material from 10 to 50 years old.

It's sad to see such founts of hard science simply go to the recycling center (and hopefully be recycled). Assuming their knowledge is outdated, I'm encouraging their demise. Maybe someone on eBay collects the stuff, but it's too much work to find that out.

Is there any hope? The books go to recycling on Saturday. Thanks.

Um, a used book store?

Keep the cool ones. I have here a New Scientist from 1962 which includes an article on "cytoplasmic inheritance" in which they've basically discovered mitochondrial DNA but don't know it yet; an article about training pigeons to work on assembly lines pecking at defective products to mark them out; and, best of all, an article on "the world's most powerful computer", Atlas, an actually not bad at all 0.5MIPS peak, including the splendid remark "a laboratory 'lash-up' would be made sooner than this", using "lash-up" in exactly the modern sense.

My dad has a geology textbook from the 1930s which predates the theory of plate tectonics, and thus in many important areas of geology frankly admits that people have no idea what's going on.

Peter

By definition, scientific textbooks from the past are outdated and the so-called "knowledge" contained within could turn out to be false. Their only value is as a historical curiosity ("hey look, those guys thought Pluto was a planet back then.").

Bin 'em.

Yeah, what Peter said. Peter's conclusion is the opposite of mine, yet for the same reasons.

I have a very old Boy Scout hand book (I think 1900) that states men lose their hair as they age because they wear hats. Women don’t lose their hair because they take pride in their hair and keep it well groomed.

Utterly classic.

Fortunately, even back in those days people didn't necessarily believe that. Folk mythology is everywhere even today.

Example: I saw a *new* textbook in my high school which stated that stars twinkle and planets don't. So even current textbooks need to be taken with a grain of salt.

See if your local library has any use for them.

tanstaafl.

Yea, I guess I should pitch my OS2 manuals and floppies. It’s been a while since I used them.

God, yes.

Hold on to the floppies, I couldn't update a BIOS at work today because the only way to do it was to stick a file on a blank floppy. Still had to find a drive to put it in, but that was actually the easy part.

I've got a wonderful inorganic chemistry book from 1928 my father gave me years ago, which is full of perfectly relevant and utterly fascinating information, much of which is difficult to find in modern books since they're so safety conscious as to be emasculated. For example, there is an experiment showing the photochemical reaction of chlorine and hydrogen with revolves around blowing some thin glass bulbs, filling them with a stoichiometric mix of the two gases, and sealing them off with a bunsen burner in the dark.

It goes on to arrange one of these bulbs in a dark box, with a shutter on one side, so it can be opened to a source of UV light as a classroom demo. "A substantial explosion will result" is the comment, along with instructions to allow the (presumably surviving) students to do a writeup on the the experiment.

The one with Nitrogen Trichloride scares even me

I had some books, sadly now long vanished, which I seem to recall were a Time-Life set of popular science books that my mother bought for me in the 70s. I recently came across the one on space technology at a friends house, and was amused and impressed by a paragraph on the future of global communications using comm-sats. There was a bit along the lines of "For example, in the near future it is possible to imagine that one could contact, from your own phone, any one of the billions of people anywhere in the world at any time" using the miracle of geosynchronous satellites. It predicted the modern cell-phone network remarkable accurately, and this was in about 1971.

Not all old information is wrong...

pca

Since I'm old I'm kind of in to old things. I recently obtained an "IBM PC" with a 5 ¼” floppy drive and a 10 Meg HD (Upgraded from two 5 ¼”) for $2.

It works and is loaded with old Disney games and the like. It even has a nice user friendly (for the day) menu to select programs.

3.3 DOS. That's when an operating system was an operating system. You had to walk 10 miles through the snow....... etc

I'm going to echo Bitt here. My experience isn't really with old books per say, but still with books that I wasn't sure anyone would want.

Last summer I helped clean out my parents' home and held a garage sale. At the end of it we had about a hundred books, mostly fiction. Most of what was left was of the bestseller variety, mostly thrillers and crime novels (Patterson, Follet, etc.).

Now, I understand that these books do not comprise the greatest nor scarcest literature in the world, but it was shocking how dismissive the people at Goodwill were when we brought them by The guy was almost angry at me.

But the thought of simply throwing these books away just seemed wrong (and they were well-kept hardcovers, too!), so we took them to our local used book store and they took them off our hands in order to hand them off to whichever local library would next have a book sale. We got a pretty significant tax credit for each box of books, too.

I'm sure someone is enjoying a like-new hardcover Robert Ludlum right now that they probably picked up for a buck fifty.

Full sets (I only have Planets, Man and Space, Energy, Mathematics, but there's apparently 26 in total) do occasionally come up on Ebay for no money plus infinity shipping.

Some of the stuff in "Planets" was sufficiently advanced -- and sufficiently carelessly-lost between the 1960s and the 1990s -- that a friend of mine actually spent a proportion of his PhD rediscovering some of it, and was understandably galled when I let on that some of his conclusions were already contained in the astronomy book I grew up with.

Peter

Ah, that might be why, then. No-one buys fiction hardcover books, once the trade paperback edition is out. Unless it's a limited edition, or otherwise rare item, the only thing you can do when you're done with them is (try) selling them at a garage sale, or donate them for a tax-writeoff, to a non-profit who will (try) selling them.

Or a used book store. People buy hardcovers there all the time. Do you people not have these where you live or something?

Even if it's outdated technical data, there's probably someone who's interested, and used bookstores are a good outlet for them.

Agreed. The one in my home town is named, appropriately, "The Old Book Company." They sell quite a lot of used books, but also deal in rare and collectible books as well. I'm sure, though, that they have a place for technical books, and if they don't they would still take them and know where to pass them along to. And like I said, there's a potential tax credit.

Nothing will part me from my: "Wonder Book Of Daring Deeds" - 1950 edition, how the world has changed, Everest's been climbed in the meantime (Although, arguably it had been in 1950)!

Are you being snide, or just condescending?

I was speaking specifically of the popular fiction hardcover, which he was referring to having left over. This summer, I've sold roughly $300 of books (i.e. that's what they paid me for them) to used book stores, and not once have they taken a popular fiction hardcover book. The hardcovers they've taken have been a) children's books, or b) a rare title. Every book purchaser I've dealt with has said the same -- they don't sell if the paperback is also available. Obviously, my used book store may have different rules than yours, as well as different sales patterns.

Most of those books I've sold have come from garage sales, where we've picked them up at the end of the day, quite literally, for free. When we've been there at both the start and end of the garage sale, we've been able to see exactly what's selling -- for the most part, it's not the hardcover fiction.

So all those hardcover books, we've donated to a small non-profit bookstore that sells books to raise money for the local library. They do sell there, though it's very slowly -- the turnover rate on their hardcover bookshelves is not high. Thus demonstrating why other bookstores won't take them.

Neither. I'm just astounded at the dismissal of trying to sell used books to a used book store.

My (closest) used book store specifically asks for "Any new releases from the last few months hardcover or paperback." They have lots of hardback books, as do the other five used book stores in town that I can think of.

I mean, are you going to get a huge amount of money for them? No. But it's better than throwing them in the dumpster. And most of them will take your books and donate them to charity if they don't want them to sell themselves.

Ah, see, I wasn't dismissing the notion -- we've obviously had very different experiences with our used book stores, and I was trying to suggest there might be a reason why even the Goodwill folks weren't interested in the books.


Agreed. In our case, the book-selling was a way of helping to recoup the cost of purchasing clothing for a new infant (I can't believe that people spend so much money on brand new baby clothes, when they grow out of them so fast), and we've actually made more money from the books, than we've spent on the clothes.


I prefer to donate them to a charity directly, so that I can get the tax write off, but if you don't have one as handy as we do...

Interesting. I note that they're also asking for Goosebumps books -- the last several times we've tried to get rid of some of those, they were rejected because the inventory they had weren't selling.

In my experience (assuming you're talking about actual Goodwill and not just any-old thrift store) Goodwill is incredibly picky about everything. I don't even bother with them any more; it's pointless. If it's up to their standards, I have no desire to get rid of it.

Yeah, what Bitt said. The last time I went go Goodwill (and I let them know in no uncertain terms that it was the last time I would ever be there) they rejected the whole car load of things I was bringing, including (among other stuff) a sleeping bag that had been used maybe twice, some brand new clothing with tags still attached, and a nice matching decorative towel set. Why the rejection? Because one of the four wash clothes in the towel set had bleach damage.

The Salvation Army folks were delighted to accept all of it.

tanstaafl.

I'm assuming the same, as it was the store mentioned by name. We have a Goodwill outlet store near us, where you can buy stuff by the pound (though not books), so they obviously take in more stuff than they can get rid of. Having trawled through some of the bins there, the Goodwill folks in our area aren't being as picky as they could be.

Wow, that's crazy. I've seen stuff on their shelves with more damage than that.

Yeah, I was talking about an actual Goodwill place, where the whole parking lot in back is filled with cars unloading into big dumpsters of stuff to donate.

It wasn't just the rejection of the contents, it was the attitude the guy gave me. I don't care if I was trying to give him the most undesirable item on the planet. I'm still just a person trying to give something away. He didn't have to be a d**k about it. I remember him actually muttering under his breath something like "I can't believe people keep trying to force this crap on us." That guy really pissed me off.

And I know for a fact that, while they weren't valuable, there were definitely some uncommon books in the collection. But the guy took a cursory look at the bunch and passed judgment on all of it. Grr, I'm getting pissed thinking about it. Suffice to say that I agree with assessments you all have for Goodwill.

Thanks for all the interesting replies and recollections. However, when I woke up late Saturday and was rushing to the recycling center, I whisked those seven grocery bags of old books into the wagon and parted with them moments later, having forgotten about this thread.

In some of the since texts I flipped through, the science was so hard I got a bruise. As you all have mentioned, I wonder if current texts are watered down, forgetting these molded, water-stained facts.

Yet, in them, I saw no comical recipes for explosions or incorrect "fact", not even Luminiferous aether. Now I'm hoping I did keep some of the good ones, like the few early edition Merk Manuals.

And yes, Goodwill stores should think twice about the dross and glass they accept. By me, people "donate" by dumping late grandma's dresser drawers in trash bags, used silky bits and all, and heaping the bags on Goodwill's back porch. The one or two grocery bags of nicely folded, never work, tags still attached donations from my sister are easily overlooked.